Dr. Vilna Bashi Treitler is Full Professor of Sociology in the Department of Black and Latino Studies at Baruch College and in the Sociology Program at the Graduate Center, in the City University of New York. She creates and teaches scholarship that theorizes about the dynamics of hierarchical socioeconomic structures, particularly as groups are incorporated into local and global stratification systems like the economic and political divisions between "First-" and "Third-World" nations, labor markets or racial structures. She has also earned distinctions for expertise in qualitative research methods.

She’s the author of The Ethnic Project: How Racial Fictions Buttress Ethnic Factions (Stanford University Press, 2013), which argues that beliefs in racial distinctions persist – despite 100 years of evidence proving them false – because ethnic groups use their social agency to fight for a better racial status, thus reifying rather than dismantling the racial structure. Her previous book, Survival of the Knitted: Immigrant Social Networks in a Stratified World (Stanford University Press, 2007), provides a new model of immigrant networks and shows how transnational networks shaped black migrants’ socioeconomic adaptation in New York, London, Canada, and the Caribbean. Survival was named Finalist for the Thomas-Znanecki Book Award given by the American Sociological Association's section on International Migration.

She edited the book Race in International and Transracial Adoption (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) that gathers contributions from scholars on adoption from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and she is also conducting a separate National Science Foundation-funded study on adoption in the U.S. and Europe. She is also editing (with co-editor Manuela Boatca of Freie Universität Berlin) the book Global Hierarchies and Inequalities, planned to be simultaneously published both as a special issue of Current Sociology and a Sage Manuscript.